How Customizable Is Shopify, Really? Standing Out at Scale without Giving Up Control

Better to move fast with new projects, products, and campaigns or to create rich customer experiences — one line of code at a time?

Standing out at scale often means sacrificing speed-to-market for customization and control. Uniqueness takes time, especially for design and development.

It’s a dilemma that lies at the center of enterprise-level ecommerce.

The thing is: It’s also false.

Today, let’s pull back the curtain and take aim at a question we hear regularly, “Just how customizable is Shopify, really?” To do that, we’ll look at five areas where myths associated with this deceptive either-or fallacy can stunt growth and kill progress.

1. Customizing Themes: “To template or not to template, that is the question.”

The decision to build your site from scratch or start with a templated theme isn’t an easy one. Ground-up development — the kind that open-source code allows — gives you full control over every decision as you plan, create, and optimize.

Control like that is seductive. But does it pay off? Perhaps a better question is: What’s your goal?

“Unconsciously, we give preference to things and people we’re familiar with. … Even if the stimuli you’re being repeatedly exposed to is negative (e.g. an abusive relationship), you will subconsciously find comfort in the familiarity of it.”

In ecommerce, Amazon is the king of familiarity. So much so that its “conversion rate among Prime members is 74%.” That’s 1,133% higher than those same shoppers at other online retailers.

As Mullin puts it, “Those numbers are impressive. So, what gives? Amazon’s copy and design aren’t 1,133% better than everyone else’s. Amazon converts so much better than the competition because it’s familiar … to the point of habit.”

In other words, the power of familiarity — creating a user experience that is first and foremost natural — offers substantial evidence against the need to recreate the wheel.

Instead, what really matters is balance: giving customers just enough originality that you stand out, but not so much that finding what they want becomes a chore.

Built off of Shopify’s Debut theme, you’d never know their storefront wasn’t coded from the ground up. High-quality product images, mobile optimization, and the use of full-screen video merge to create a customer experience that reflects Ledbury without sacrificing ease-of-use:

As Ledbury co-founder Paul Watson explains:

“Using the Shopify Plus themes has allowed us to quickly iterate on design layouts and functionality with our development partners at Maui New York. The result is a superb user experience to our customers while streamlining our operational processes on the back-end.”

C by GE — in conjunction with their Parter, ZehnerGroup — utilizes a host of interactive elements to show off their state-of-the-art LED smart bulb:

Ecommerce mattress manufacturer Leesa — who last year was named among Forbes’ Top 20 Startups to Watch — uses their storefront to showcase a deft mix of social proof, educational content, and calls-to-action:

And with photography and technology powerhouse Think Tank Photo, beautiful design was just the start.

From accounting and inventory automation to information-rich content and stunning imagery to “a seamless integration between Shopify and a custom built CMS using Python’s Django framework as a canvas,” Shopify Agency Partner ZDCA customized Think Tank Photo from the backend forward:

In the words of Philip Vasilevski, the co-founder and technical director at Maui New York who partnered with Ledbury:

“The development workflow with Shopify is the best of any ecommerce platform — both in terms of front-end styling and CMS capabilities. Beyond that, Shopify Plus provides great documentation, API support, and tools like Theme Kit.”

2. Customizing Products: “Complex doesn’t mean complicated.”

Theme customization on Shopify strikes a balance between familiarity and originality. Both of which are frontend considerations.

Customizing your products, on the other hand, is far more about striking a balance between the frontend — for customers — and the backend — for merchants. After all, it’s one thing to display your products beautifully. It’s another matter to make them easy to purchase, update, add, remove, manage, and list across multiple sales channels.

Our position is straightforward: you shouldn’t need a giant IT team or coding knowledge to add a product, change copy, update images, load a video, or even optimize details like pricing, shipping, and SEO. Everybody should be able to do these things without software getting in the way.

For streamlined management, Shopify’s RESTful API integrates directly with your existing OMS, PIM, 3PL, and CRM. The same API access can also be used to bulk upload or update your products.

As for customization, three points deserve special attention.

First, multi-channel sales. Once you’ve set up your products, Shopify’s native integration means you can automatically push individual products or entire collections to 15 different channels. Most notably: POS for physical sales, social networks like Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram, chat platforms for conversational commerce, mobile apps, wholesale, and Buzzfeed.

Second, variants. For merchants with deeply customizable products, Shopify’s 100 variant limit is often seen as a black mark. Complete code control over the backend removes such limitations … or so the argument goes.

“Metafields allow frontend developers and designers to evolve their themes and products beyond what’s possible with the default data fields. This is the hidden super power that helps drive some amazing custom designs.”

Jason Bowman, Shopify Plus APAC Team Lead

In their most straightforward form, metafields can be used to add product information (like care instructions for apparel):

More advanced usage — particularly with the ShopifyFD tool — extends to product videos, hover features, affiliate links, and any other custom adaptations you’d like to make:

How does all this translate to the frontend? This time, let’s peek briefly at two examples of Shopify customization in action.

Last month Kim Kardashian launched KKW Beauty. The site featured five unique cosmetic sets, all of which sold out in a matter of hours.

To achieve this, KKW showcased each set with a mobile-friendly blend of product images, in-action shots, and a “Read More” option to toggle seamlessly between description and visuals:

At the opposite end of the spectrum, take Nice Laundry’s “Build Your Box.” Not only can customers filter, expand, and add 108 different products to their cart, they can also select sizes and engage in live chat … all without ever leaving a single page:

3. Customizing Discounts: “I thought Shopify just did coupon codes.”

While competing on price as a growth strategy is self-defeating, it’s not as though price is irrelevant. When it comes to acquiring new customers, retaining and rewarding the ones you already have, and maximizing average order value, price is a powerful leverage point.

Unfortunately, optimizing discounts at scale is often the “king of all ecommerce migraine headaches.”

“Imagine having tens of thousands of products for sale on your site, offering discounts to customers who buy in bulk, but having to manually add each discount you want to offer because you can’t automate the process.”

For Merchology — a leading provider of corporate branded apparel and accessories with more than 50,000 products — the search for a way to automate discounting was what led them to Shopify Plus.

Customizing discounts on Shopify comes down to three options.

(1) Discount Codes

Naturally, you can create discount codes for customers to enter manuallyat checkout. These codes can be applied to specific products, collections, customers, or universally.

Pura Vida Bracelets utilizes first-time buyer codes masterfully by not only offering a variety of overlays but by adding the appropriate code to the top of each customer’s browser so that it follows them throughout their journey:

(2) Price Discounts

Much like codes, price discounts are manual creations you can use to mark down products or collections. The result is a comparable price that shows off savings in the form of dollar amounts, percentages, or both.

However, don’t let the simplicity of this approach fool you.

Lapis Lois, for instance, has applied price discounts in an ingenious way. To begin, the jewelry seller operates two storefronts: (1) their usual LapisLoisJewelry.com domain and (2) a Deals-LapisLoisJewelry.com subdomain. Visiting the second of the two immediately prompts you for a password, which they leveraged last month after an appearance on Today:

“This is a game changer. Instead of finding workarounds, using apps, or writing code to trick the system, Scripts gives us the flexibility we need to customize ecommerce sites which benefits merchants, customers, and agencies like us.”

4. Customizing Checkouts: “But can you customize Shopify when it matters most?”

Of course, ecommerce didn’t invent this idea. Rather, it’s a digital adaptation of sales and marketing’s most universal principle: the right offer, design, images, copy, and incentives count for nothing if you can’t close the deal.

In ecommerce, failure to optimize closest to the money results in two painful words: abandoned carts. Eliminating abandoned carts means that customizing your checkout process is one place it pays (pun intended) to retain fine-grain control. Optimization demands governing exactly what your customers experience, lest they fail to become customers.

The truth is: Until Shopify Plus, this was easily the biggest objection to customization on Shopify.

“The ability to customize with Shopify Plus really allows us to push it to the limit and create a custom checkout experience customers can trust and be confident that their personal and payment information is safe. It really makes customers feel like the site is going to take care of them.”

Thankfully — in addition to the cart features mentioned in the discounts section — Shopify Plus merchants can completely customize their checkouts through the checkout.liquid file.

Unlike a site’s overall theme, checkout.liquid is self-contained and doesn’t render any additional template files. This means you can duplicate the same styling as your site itself while — at the same time — editing the code that controls the checkout process directly.

We’ve already seen how Pura Vida uses overlay discounts to generate new customers.

Once someone enters their shopping cart, the code not only follows them, but three new incentives appear:

A “Buy any 3 Originals, Get the 4th FREE!” offer

An offer to “Help more Costa Rican Artisans” by purchasing a Mystery Bracelet

Free shipping “unlocked” based on total order value:

The checkout screen makes purchasing as easy as possible by …

Opening with PayPal and Amazon Pay gateways

Giving the option to create an account through email, Facebook, or Google

Appling the coupon code automatically

Applying free shipping automatically as well

Images via Pura Vida Bracelets

LilGadgets, on the other hand, has built a customized checkout process that displays as one screen on desktop and morphs into a three-step sequence on mobile:

Images via LilGadgets

The point of each examples is the same: whatever customization your checkout process needs, Shopify Plus can make possible.

5. Customizing Payments: “More is more, except when it’s not.”

Although accepting payments are the final step in checkout, they deserve special attention on the customization front for at least two reasons.

First, personalization.

Shopify offers over a hundred different payment gateways based on you and your customer’s location. This includes Shopify Payments — which allows you to accept cards online or off without any third-party setup — as well as a host of third-party gateways built directly into our Level 1 PCI compliant checkout. Plus, if your preferred gateway doesn’t yet exist, Shopify’s Hosted Payment SDK can integrate it.

Of course, options are great, but too many choices can lower conversion rates. In this sense, less is almost always more. That’s why the Shopify Script Editor lets you create a smart checkout experience to show, hide, or rename payment methods based on select products, customer groups or tags, or a customer’s shipping address.

The result is a payment process that’s personalized for each customer.

Second, mobile.

Pura Vida Bracelets loads PayPal and Amazon Pay front and center on their checkout screen. Why? Because on mobile, the less-is-more principle becomes paramount. In this case, fewer clicks equal more sales.

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About the Author

Aaron Orendorff is the Editor in Chief of Shopify Plus as well as a regular contributor to sites like Mashable, Lifehacker, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, Fast Company, The Huffington Post and more. You can connect with him on Twitter or LinkedIn.